The truth about property assessments

Posted
Thursday, October 17, 2013 12:40 pm

Alfonse D'Amato

With less than three weeks to go before Election Day, former County Executive Tom Suozzi and his cronies have resorted to stretching the truth and exaggerating his record to get you to believe that current County Executive Ed Mangano is bad news for taxpayers.

Let me set the record straight.

In eight years in the job, Suozzi raised taxes exponentially and borrowed money without limits. But his campaign would have you forget all that, because now he has a new pitch he’s trying to sell. Suozzi would have you believe that your school taxes are going up because of Mangano’s policies.

Don’t believe the hype. Suozzi is a stranger to the truth. The property tax bills many of you have been receiving reflect increases in school taxes, not county taxes. This year, the county’s school taxes have increased by an average of 6.8 percent.

Many homeowners are left asking how our taxes went up by so much if the county’s school districts requested an average 2.9 increase in collections and New York state implemented a tax cap of less than 3 percent? The answer is simple: reduced property tax revenues due to a broken tax assessment system, one that was implemented by Tom Suozzi.

Right now, people in your school district are winning reductions on their property taxes, and other residents are forced to pick up the slack. This is the system enacted by Suozzi.

Everyone appeals their property taxes! It’s hard to avoid the solicitations you receive daily from companies who want to help you do so. Currently in Nassau County, when commercial assessments go down or taxes are reduced because people appeal and get a tax certiorari refund, tax rates go up on everyone else. The tax assessment system is broken, and Ed Mangano has spent four years trying to repair it.

Those are the facts. But Suozzi expects you to believe that Mangano has caused the recent tax increases. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Mangano has tackled Nassau County’s broken assessment issue head on.

Sid Tanenbaum, who lived in Woodmere and owned a metal-stamping shop in Far Rockaway, where he was known more for his charitable ways than his two-handed set shot, has been honored for the past 30 years with a basketball tournament that raises scholarship money for students in the Five Towns.